The Spirit of '78, Stayin' Alive

E-mail spam went largely unnoticed at the time, but the year's advances in biotechnology certainly did not. Late on the evening of July 25, in the small city of Oldham in northwest England, the first "test-tube baby" was born. Louise Brown's arrival after in vitro fertilization, touched off a worldwide ethical debate about whether and how we should be fooling with Mother Nature. Thirty years later, IVF is commonplace, and genetic science has leapt astonishingly forward, but the scope of the debates -- now focused on stem cells and cloning -- remains the same.

Other eerily familiar issues from today's headlines first appeared three decades ago. Wiretapping and national security? The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- whose overhaul triggered a contentious debate last week on Capitol Hill -- was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in October 1978. Skyrocketing gas prices and national reliance on foreign oil? The country's first comprehensive national energy program was signed into law at the end of 1978 -- but only after 18 months of contentious logrolling in Congress.

You can find the roots of some of today's biggest foreign policy challenges in 1978, too. A Middle East roiled by Islamist extremism? Nineteen seventy-eight marked the beginning of the end for the shah of Iran, soon to be swept aside by the Shiite radicals led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini -- a man whose example would help pave the way for a new generation of Sunni fanatics also angry about the U.S. role in the Middle East. But while 1978 was a rotten year for U.S. efforts to prop up the shah, it was a far better one for Arab-Israeli peacemaking. Not only did the otherwise hapless Carter help broker the watershed Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty at Camp David, the summit also produced "A Framework for Peace in the Middle East," a much more ambitious document explaining how Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians would work out their own conflicts over the next five years. That time horizon proved a little ambitious, but a precedent had been set: Since 1978, Arabs and Israelis have expected the U.S. president to be personally and deeply involved in any painful deal-making.

Then as now, the Middle East got the most headlines, but it was what was happening in the Far East that would most radically shape the world. After years of near-total isolation, China decided to join the rest of the world, setting out on what its rulers called a "New Long March" to become a world power by the end of the century. Under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, Mao's heir, China ratified a peace and friendship treaty with Japan and reached out to its traditionally wary Asian neighbors. At home, it took momentous early steps toward capitalism by beginning to dismantle its agricultural communes, allowing peasants to sell their crops and pocket the profits.

The most dramatic sign of China's new openness was announced simultaneously in Beijing and Washington in December: The United States formally recognized China, broke its longstanding recognition of Taiwan and normalized relations with the communist titan. This momentous decision helped propel China into the modern world, turn it into a rival -- if not an enemy -- of the United States and intertwine the two countries' economies. Last year, U.S. trade with China was $386 billion, up from $1 billion in 1978. There is not a person reading this article who doesn't own a Chinese product.

The rise of China may not be as sexy as the student uprisings of 1968, and the passage of Prop 13 may not pack the same emotional punch as the tragic campaign of RFK. But from politics to technology, from civil rights to foreign policy, 1978 marked the start of the age we live in. Thank God, disco didn't survive.

dajoi@democracyjournal.org

Kenneth S. Baer, a former senior speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore, is co-editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.